The trend followed by several European education systems opens to the possibility of making the curriculum offered to students in each school more flexible, more tailor made. However, such trend has been unequally appropriated by systems, teachers and schools (Priestley et. al. 2021).

Explanations of this difference could rely on curriculum traditions that have been framing such educational systems ( Kuiper et. al. 2008).  Also, part of this inequality can be explained by the difficulty felt by many teachers and schools in assuming their agency in terms of curriculum decisions.

However, due to increasing traveling policies and international pressure made by OECD and other transnational institutions , acknowledgement regarding such differences have been appropriated by educational advisors and have been the support to  Erasmus+ teacher mobility at the school level.

“… the continuous impulse given by European institutions to the mobility of non-university teaching staff supports the idea of the benefits of its completion towards improving the quality of education in European Union member states.” Salcedo-López &Cuevas-López, ,2021, 6).

Has the contact with other education systems and with other teachers from other countries, stimulated by the networks established within the scope of the ERASMUS+ programme, contributed to raising the awareness of teachers who might act otherwise?

Following the perspective of Biesta et al, (2015), we understand teachers' curriculum agency as the teacher's ability to recontextualize policies and translate them into their field of action.

It is a question of exerting a double effort of interpreting the purposes that the policies have defined and of taking local action, which reconfigures and encourages student learning.

That frames the purpose of this proposal - to contribute to the discussion about the effects that these mobilities have had on the power of curricular agency of teachers from two European countries.

Its objectives are:

To relate international mobility experience with curricular agency of teachers from two European countries

To research in two countries the impact of how international experience has encouraged curriculum making in both the school and the classroom.

To identify the impact of mobility on Schools curricular options.

This work is based on an empirical investigation of a qualitative nature, carried out in the previous academic year, which collected and analyzed the testimonies of professionals from Ireland and Portugal about the topic. Interviews were carried out with two school headmasters and two teachers representing different disciplinary groups from Portugal. In Ireland, two school principals were interviewed as well as three individual teachers and two focci groups with teachers. The interviews followed a script that aimed to characterize the mobility experiences lived by the interviewees according to the operational objectives, and the effects of teachers’ mobilities both in their careers and in their daily work at schools.

Contact with other education systems and with other teachers from other countries has contributed to raising the awareness of teachers who may act otherwise. Such broad conclusion came from the teachers’ and headmasters’ awareness concerning the changes that have operated in the way of working the curriculum, namely in the classroom; the experiences they reply and apply methodologies, in the classroom, that they saw carried out in their mobility. The impact of how the international experience of these teachers has encouraged curriculum making in both the school and the classroom is also visible at school work, namely at students’ level. The impact of international collaborative projects involving students, the increased student satisfaction with pedagogical work, the Increased feeling of belonging to an European citizenship are signs of such impact.

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